Author: The Working Group.
The poverty of struggle in the West has transmuted itself into a poverty of philosophy on the topic. It seems the great dearth of struggle is not merely followed by a lack of theory on its own topic, but also by any great ('Oceanic') 'feeling' whatsoever.
It is as if, by the inevitable loneliness of waging class struggle we are driven to, or accept the presence of Psychoanalysis as a productive theoretical topic in the hearts of some in our affinities.
The year is 192X.
The Comintern has had its last patronising dalliance with the Communist Party of China. Stalin instructed his comrades at first that the character of struggle in China was one of a bourgeois-nationalist character, and that they were to liquidate themselves into the Kuomintang. (Indeed Stalin was to--consistently--prefer Chiang Kai-Shek over the Communists). Indeed, by the end of their adventure, the Chinese comrades, smarting, weary, yet heroically managed, by sheer force of will to continue their struggle to completion.
My point is this, after the last failed insurrection the Communists staged in the cities, before inexorably being forced to retreat to the countryside, in the late-1920s, Mao had already begun forming his theory of peasant revolution.
It was submitted in report form to the Party, and he was promptly not included in again in the Central Committee that year.1
Imagine how the debate would have been conducted if a Psychoanalyst had also included a report alongside Mao's about the nature of Communist struggle in China, and had even been aware of the seditious embryonic Thought of Mao Zedong?
Can you imagine the reaction of the Party? The representatives of the Comintern? They would have been purged.
Indeed Psychoanalysis would not take the rejection of their ideas as a pause for self-reflection, they would quit the proletarian mindset, and look upon the blunt comments of the eventually hegemonic Maoism ("political power grows from the barrel of a gun") with derision bordering on ecstasy.
What is the class basis of Psychoanalysis? I mean this as plainly and evenly as I say it bluntly--it is a petit-bourgeois philosophy. This can be said coolly and without prejudice, as there is just a flat answer for any philosophical system. There indeed exist thoroughly proletarian systems.
Indeed, its main energetic current today, that of Zizek and his followers, amounts to no more than this: Books and Discussion. Very vigorous, if profane and entertaining, but where has Zizek Thought penetrated any further than the Academy?
We do not need to go any further than Smith or simple classical Liberalism in order to reconstruct much of what is espoused as a Psychoanalytic Discovery.
Take Smith's Invisible Hand. Hobbes and Machiavelli's cynical and egotistical view of human nature. Indeed the idea that conscious intentionality by humans has unintended, traumatic, and sometimes disastrously irrational foundations--as well as unexpected and contradictory consequences--is known elsewhere.
But this supposed form of psychiatric therapy does not need to transformed into a chauvinism. Indeed it is an anti-Naturalist philosophy, and for this reason excluded the dialectic. I have heard this from the mouths of high-ranking Zizekians (most notably at the Hegel Society of Great Britain): Indeed Hegel and Freud make strange bed-fellows.
The fact that the problem of the relation of theory to practice had already been solved by Marx and Engels does not bother Psychoanalysis.
-- some discussion of retrogressive efficient causation; introduce the idea plainly before...
-- having some discussion on the first two chapters of Zizek's Parallax View (2005).
My overall thoughts on the above is that while Psychoanalysis certainly seems aware that there is, and perhaps even appreciates the complex Gordian Knot presented to sentient creatures as the relationship between mind and world, meaning and causality, theory and practice.
Aware, but dismissive of the lucidity of Marx and Engels, they begin to unwittingly attempt to unravel the Knot before giving up and deciding to cut it. (Lo, Lacan's Barred Subject).
Indeed in this connexion shall we consider an arbitrary and artificial dichotomy? That of Transparency versus Opacity. The Gordian Knot contains the struggle of reasoning of the Psychoanalysts, that of a problem that we know has a rational explanation, but the relation of our rational capacities to its structure is not yet homologous; isomorphic.
This is the only way I currently know how to illustrate the difference between bourgeois versus proletarian personalities: instead of worshiping the mystique of complexity, and asserting that the Knot is "Opaque", a worker would merely go about solving the problem of the Knot, and , by moving to the dialectical understanding of practice and theory, could, through ACTIVITY prove the Transparency of the riddle of the Gordian Knot.
The is the issue I have with Psychoanalysis: I say to them, please, for all our sake, leave the realm of contemplation and assume a posture of activity.
This perhaps sheds more light on how I imagine the CPC would have perceived the "Parallax Gap" between the (then) failure of the Party, and Mao's Report. I include the Liberal Psychoanalyst report as a way of sharpening the point. The Psychoanalyst is not interested in the question "What Is To Be Done?", and, not only that, fails to supply a proletarian mentality.
The truth is there is no Parallax Gap, and the whole talk of it muddies the perception and interaction with the objective world.
The solution to the (then) crisis of the CPC was the following--this is what they did, and it worked. They did not Psycho-analyse themselves, their leaders back in Moscow, the peasantry, or the Chinese proletariat. They adopted Mao's theory of struggle and did not make it a question of neuroses or anxieties. By the time of the Long March, no-one could reach the Communists because their guerrilla war had become so remote, and, somewhat fortuitously, perhaps even accidentally, the Comintern backed off and only thereafter involved themselves discreetly in China.
The brute force of material conditions, combined with their fidelity to the Leninist Method, ensured their success.
Indeed there is much to be gained by asserting Transparency over Opacity. History and Reality are to be ignored or spurned (Zizek-ified...) at one's own peril. Through duty and fidelity to their practice of Marxism, the Communists were overwhelming and heroically successful. It is as if the wellsprings of the incessant and permanent impulse to collective social struggle by humans, in its full dialectical force, Just Is.
The conception of the human personality by the Psychoanalysts is a far cry from the truth--unity and solidarity are the watchwords of today, not "cooperation despite egotism", or perhaps even "cooperation through egotism".
* By way of an aside, haven't you experienced the ruthless democracy of a Leninist Party yet?